He felt sure that the two waiters exchanged glances. He looked at them,—a mistake again—and got hotter.
“Oh!” said Lady Harman and regarded him with frank amusement in her eyes. The thing struck her at first in the light of a joke. “I’ve only got one-and-eightpence. I didn’t expect——”
She blushed as beautifully as ever. Then she produced a small but plutocratic-looking purse and handed it to him.
“Most remarkable—inconvenient,” said Mr. Brumley, opening the precious thing and extracting a shilling. “That will do,” he said and dismissed the waiter with a tip of sixpence. Then with the open purse still in his hand, he spent much of his remaining strength trying to look amused and unembarrassed, feeling all the time that with his flushed face and in view of all the circumstances of the case he must be really looking very silly and fluffy.
“It’s really most inconvenient,” he remarked.
“I never thought of the—of this. It was silly of me,” said Lady Harman.
“Oh no! Oh dear no! The silliness I can assure you is all mine. I can’t tell you how entirely apologetic——Ridiculous fix. And after I had persuaded you to come here.”
“Still we were able to pay,” she consoled him.
“But you have to get home!”
She hadn’t so far thought of that. It brought Sir Isaac suddenly into the picture. “By half-past five,” she said with just the faintest flavour of interrogation.